If you want to better understand what's going on here, the topic you want to read up on is references. The perldoc page for this is called perlref. The Camel book also has a chapter on this, and it is well covered in Effective Perl Programming as well.

update: ISBN linking does not work the way I thought I remembered... Oh, I see, it's deliberate.

In reply to Re: Assigning a returned value to a hash variable by jonadab
in thread Assigning a returned value to a hash variable by Real Perl

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